Comment 234 for bug 390508

Approaching this logically would be excellent. "The whole point of Ubuntu and free software is to be better than commercial" is a muddled premise -- Ubuntu is both free software *and* commercial -- but I understand what you're getting at. Unfortunately, you have omitted the logical route from there to "We should somehow at the very least, come half way and allow a choice for to have the expire option or not". That is merely an argument to moderation.

In software design, arguments to moderation are not just logical fallacies, they also tend to make the software worse. In introducing "a choice to have the expire option", not only would someone need to incorporate and test Ankur's timeout behavior, someone would need to design, implement, and test the option as well. Designing the option would be particularly difficult, because users would find it difficult to believe that they were being expected to care about it.

The people who have tried to figure out why the timeout does not work are going by out-of-date notify-send documentation. nh2 kindly attached a patch that adds the sentence "Currently ignored" to the timeout flag description. Unfortunately that implies that the change is temporary, when it is not; a viable patch would just remove mention of the flag altogether.

It is not the responsibility of a software project to contain the union of all features or options provided by its predecessors. That leads to overcomplexity and to increasingly unreliable and unmaintainable software. Finally, "fewer choices has always, eventually, led to monopolies, dictators, and single source dominations" is confusing cause and effect. Those things result in fewer choices, they are not caused by fewer choices.